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Sales recruitment
Most sales hiring decisions are made on polish. The candidate who tells the cleanest story, holds eye contact and sounds certain wins the room. Then the first quarter arrives and the polish does not convert. Meanwhile the quieter candidate who asked three sharp questions about your buyer got passed over.
The gap is simple. Interviews reward talking about selling. The job rewards selling. Unless your process makes candidates actually do the work, you are hiring a presenter.
A job description lists duties. A scorecard defines what success looks like and how you will measure it, before you meet anyone. Write it with the hiring manager and the person who will own the number.
Keep it to one page:
Score every candidate against the same one page. The moment two interviewers are working from different mental pictures, the process is decided by whoever speaks last.
Sales roles are unusually easy to simulate. Use that.
Give the candidate a short buyer brief twenty minutes before the call. Ask them to run fifteen minutes of discovery with you playing the buyer. Do not coach and do not rescue. You are watching for question quality, whether they quantify the problem, whether they hear the thing you half said, and whether they can sit in silence.
Ask for the follow up email within an hour of the exercise. This one artefact tells you more than a second interview. Does it capture their own numbers, name next steps, and stay short? Written clarity is a daily requirement in a modern sales cycle where half the buying group never meets you.
Ask the candidate to walk their current or last pipeline. How many open deals, average value, stage definitions, where they are stuck and what they are doing about it. Strong sellers know these numbers cold. Weak ones talk about relationships.
Confidence is easy to perform for an hour. Behaviour is hard to fake for ninety minutes of real work.
Structure is what turns three opinions into a decision.
Score in writing, alone, before the debrief. Group discussion first is the fastest way to lose a good hire to one confident voice.
Some patterns show up again and again in Indian B2B sales hiring:
None of these are automatic rejections. All of them need a second, harder look.
Half of hiring failures are onboarding failures. The candidate could sell, the ramp let them down.
If a hire is off at day 30, you can still fix it. If nobody looks until day 120, you are back in the market and down two quarters.
Add the scorecard and the live exercise. Those two changes alone move most teams from gut feel to evidence, and they cost you an hour per candidate.
Then measure the thing that matters: what percentage of hires from the last four quarters hit their day 90 milestones. That number, tracked honestly, tells you whether your hiring process predicts performance or just rewards confidence.
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